What is Classic Hardcore?
For many players, World of Warcraft is simply a way to cool down after a long day of work. Others seek the challenge and set themselves difficult Goals or restriction for making their play through harder. Classic Hardcore trumps them all by providing an extensive ruleset, restrictions, and even events.
Classic Hardcore is a community project, welcoming everyone who seeks a challenge or feels like normal World of Warcraft gets too ‘dry’. While everyone can participate, there are some rules if one wants to achieve glory and reach the Hall of Legends, the leaderboards. As there is no other viable way of checking for cheaters, video proof is mandatory. However, if you just seek a personal challenge and don’t care for the leaderboards, you can still play hardcore without recording, as long as you play by the rules and are honest.
What are the rules for Classic Hardcore?
The full ruleset can be found by following the link below, however, we’ve outlined the most important rules for you.
- 1-Life-Rule: There are no second chances; If you die, you must delete your character or leave it as a Perma-Ghost, you know, just for remembering it.
- Gear, Items, and Trading: You are allowed to use everything you either craft yourself, receive as quest rewards, drops or from NPC Traders. There is no restriction on rarities. However, trading with other players is not permitted, including conjourables and the Auction House. Player to player mail is also forbidden. Once you reach level 60, you can trade directly within your guild. The auction house is still forbidden, though.
- World and player buffs as well as assistance are permitted if not explicitly asked for.
If you fancy playing hardcore but don’t want to do it alone, there are special duo and trio rules. For example, you are only allowed to play together and all share one life, meaning if one dies, the run is over.
Upon reaching max-level, one earns the rank of immortality. This does not give you any benefits, however, you get the rights for bragging in front of every other player.
How to play Classic HC
For anyone who is interested in playing through this challenge, there is an official add-on for helping you not to break any rules, featuring multiple quality of life additions. It provides in game alerts whenever another hardcore player in the guild dies or violates the rules, a social blocker preventing you from trading with other players and blocks the usage of the auction house. It comes with a built-in anti-cheat and auto-verifier for uploading your run-data directly to the boards. The download link can be
found below.
To start, you can simply download the addon and create your character on one of the community chosen Hardcore Servers for Classic Wow. These are Hydraxian Waterlords for EU and Bloodsail Buccaneers for NA players.
The significance of this community challenge can be seen in the latest news leaking through several sites. Apparently, Blizzard is planning and working on their own hardcore mode. Data miners from WoWHead found Interface-Strings referring to hardcore mode in different places inside the code. An official ruleset is not yet available, and probably won’t be until the new mode gets officially announced. Until then, the community made add-on and ruleset are your best bet.
If we tickled your interest, follow the links below to get started playing hardcore.
Links: